• Xbox Head, Phil Spencer has addressed the leaks about an Xbox console refresh that flooded the internet this week.
• Spencer told players that the company would reveal its real plans when it was ready.
• An internal memo urged staff to focus on things they could control rather than the leak.

This week a poorly redacted document related to the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Microsoft was picked apart by the gaming community. The document in question contained several images that showcased details of a mid-generation refresh for the Xbox Series X|S consoles.

The images highlighted several performance and sustainability updates to the consoles as well as an all-new, feature-rich controller. As you might imagine, Microsoft didn’t want this news to break until it was ready and now head of Xbox, Phil Spencer has addressed the matter.

“We’ve seen the conversation around old emails and documents. It is hard to see our team’s work shared in this way because so much has changed and there’s so much to be excited about right now, and in the future. We will share the real plans when we are ready,” Spencer wrote in an update on X, formerly Twitter.

That mention of “real plans” implies that the plans have changed although that’s to be expected given that the document detailing the old plan is dated 2022. The leak is also likely to force Xbox’s hand in this regard.

This is given further credence given the internal memo penned by Spencer to staff that The Verge was able to track down.

Team,
Today, several documents submitted in the court proceedings related to our proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard were unintentionally disclosed. I know this is disappointing, even if many of the documents are well over a year old and our plans have evolved.
I also know we all take the confidentiality of our plans and our partners’ information very seriously. This leak obviously is not us living up to that expectation. We will learn from what happened and be better going forward. We all put incredible amounts of passion and energy into our work, and this is never how we want that hard work to be shared with the community. That said, there’s so much more to be excited about, and when we’re ready, we’ll share the real plans with our players.
In closing, I appreciate all of the work that you pour into Team Xbox to surprise and delight our players. In the days and weeks ahead, let’s stay focused on what we can control: continuing the amazing success of Starfield, the upcoming launch of the incredible and accessible Forza Motorsport, and continuing to build games, services and devices that millions of players can enjoy.
Phil

Of course, we don’t know how the plans have changed but we hope that the Xbox Series S is getting a bit more than a 1TB storage capacity update. While the console offers a great entry point for gamers, it could do with just a bit of a bump in performance.

It’s not clear at this stage how this document containing private information made its way online without anybody thinking to redact that highly confidential information. We suspect that the problem stems from how the PDF was published. At first glance the document appears to simply contain a few pages but if one opens the document in a PDF reader, a swathe of additional documents are accessible via Bookmarks. The document is also labelled redacted but it’s rather poor redaction.

All of this is to say that the document we reported on yesterday is likely to change drastically before Xbox makes an official announcement.